FREE Outlook Tips and Tricks

This weekly Email Magazine (Ezine) will help you with your Marketing Strategies by giving you practical hands-on information, useful exercises and insightful techniques and practices not found in most books.

Every week you will pick up new information which will let you do your day-to-day business better and faster.

You will also learn:

• Articles that can accelerate your productivity instantly
• Short Tips and Tricks that have you saying "If only I knew that last week!"
• Video shows that will explain ways to profit by Outlook
• Reviews of Tools and Resources that will show you where to put your money...and where NOT

Learn Outlook and other marketing tools (yes, Outlook is a marketing tool) which will assist you in ways you have not imagined. Just try it out and see if YOU don't accelerate your business productivity immediately.

Here's some Tips and Tricks to get you started (and excited!)

On Views: did you know that…

…Any View you apply to any folder or subfolder will be retained for the next time you come back to that folder or subfolder?

…That any item created in a subfolder will NOT allow the creation of a reminder? That includes followup flags for email and contacts, appointments, and tasks. Use categories and views to see these as a group, not subfolders.

…That you can drag an item to a folder and if you hover over a folder, that folder will automatically expand into a subfolder (if one exists). This is actually a windows feature.

Drag Addresses Between To, Cc, and Bcc Fields in Outlook

When composing or replying to an e-mail message in Outlook, you can easily rearrange the names of the people receiving the message by dragging their e-mail addresses between the To, Cc, and Bcc address fields. Just select the name or names you want to move and drag them into the destination field. Use Ctrl-A for all (which is quite handy for large emailings)

Editor's Note: If you have errant semicolons in the To, Cc, or Bcc fields, you can remove all them by pressing ALT+K

Three Very Short Shortcuts

1) Use Ctrl-Z to Undo your last action. It must be the very next action but it’s good for instantly recovering email, calendars, tasks and so on.

2) From your inbox use the Home key to jump to the first email in your list (or the End key to jump to the end).

3) Ctrl-Shift-M is the fastest way to create a new email from within Outlook no matter where you are.

Search all text in messages

Did you know that you can control whether to search all the text in your email when using your Find Now? Click on the Find box in the standard toolbar if it is not active. Then click on Options to the far right of the Look For box. Click Search All Text in Each Message. Click again to exclude searches from within the text.

Quickly Find a To: person in your email

Trying to find a particular email from someone? You could type their name in the Look for box and click on Find Now, but here’s a faster way. Sort by the From heading (click on that column heading) and then type that person’s first letter. You’ll usually see them right there. Fast and Easy!

Anniversary Date

Many times you will find that you want to record the date of your first meeting. Ever thought about using the anniversary date? It is less romantic, but it certainly makes it useful for easy access to show if you have ever done business with that person.

Contact Notes

When someone sends you an email about themselves in an email “Hi, I just wanted to say thanks and tell you a little bit about myself…and then they do…just highlight their marketing text information and drop it into the Notes portion of their Contact. That will make it simple if you have forgotten their name and want to find them later with a keyword. If you don't have the contact you can always right-click on their email address in the Reading Pane and select Add new contact.

Lose a column header?

Sometimes in our haste we just simply click the wrong button…and then don’t really know what it was that we did until later when we need that feature…sounds familiar doesn’t it. If you should lose a column heading in any table view of your data, just click on Field Chooser in the Advanced toolbar (towards the right). A dialog box will appear. You can then use the drop down to select the right set of fields and then drag the field you want back into the headings column of choice (it will show you 2 red arrows pointing to the insertion point).

Remove all Junk Email with Shift-Delete

. If one email is highlighted in your junk email folder, just press Ctrl-A to highlight all of them and hit Shift Delete. That will permanently delete all of them without sending them to the Deleted folder.

Electronic Sticky notes make a great phone message taker

. If you type faster than you write, consider using an Outlook Note for taking messages for the phone calls. Use Ctrl-Shift-N before you listen to your messages. Notes stay up even when Outlook is minimized. Then you can work each item on the note…create a followup flag, fix a phone number in your contacts and call back, create a task, or whatever seems appropriate.

Spell Check is OFF by Default

The Outlook Spell check is off by default. Turn it on from Tools, Options, Spelling tab, and check “Always check spelling before sending”. Also note the other spelling features…if you are technical you may want to check “Ignore words with numbers” and “Ignore words in UPPER case”.

This is just a sampling of the kind of information you will get in the Outlook Tips and Tricks Ezine, emailed to you every week.

Sign up now and get going with great business techniques!

Look forward to "seeing" you in just a little bit.

To your success and prosperity,

Paul Wagner
The Software Magician